Review: Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality by Elizabeth Eulberg

Revenge of the Girl with the Great Personality by Elizabeth Eulberg

Publication Date: March 1, 2013
Page Count: 272
Format: Hardcover
Published by: Point
Source: library

Synopsis From Goodreads:
A hilarious new novel from Elizabeth Eulberg about taking the wall out of the wallflower so she can bloom.

Don't mess with a girl with a great personality!

Everybody loves Lexi. She's popular, smart, funny...but she's never been one of those girls, the pretty ones who get all the attention from guys. And on top of that, her seven-year-old sister, Mackenzie, is a terror in a tiara, and part of a pageant scene where she gets praised for her beauty (with the help of fake hair and tons of makeup).

Lexi's sick of it. She's sick of being the girl who hears about kisses instead of getting them. She's sick of being ignored by her longtime crush, Logan. She's sick of being taken for granted by her pageant-obsessed mom. And she's sick of having all her family's money wasted on a phony pursuit of perfection.

The time has come for Lexi to step out from the sidelines. Girls without great personalities aren't going to know what hit them. Because Lexi's going to play the beauty game - and she's in it to win it.

The protagonist, Lexi, has always been told she has a great personality. Which is not always a bad thing. But Lexi's mother constantly makes Lexi feel 2nd best next to her younger sister. Sadly, Lexi's mother and sister come straight out of Toddlers & Tiaras, and they have all of the bad behavior and bratty attitude that the show is known for. Lexi has come to resent the shallowness of the beauty pageants, so she makes no attempt with her own appearance. When Lexi and her best friend, Benny, make an agreement to go after their crushes, Lexi finds herself glamming it up - and she surprisingly enjoys the new found attention. Lexi quickly becomes part of the 'in' crowd, but discovers how challenging it is to keep her great personality while working so hard at being popular. Lexi realizes that she is better off with more of a middle ground between not caring about her appearance at all and the beauty pageant look.

Lexi's family life is a mess. Her parent's are divorced, and her father doesn't play much of a role in her life (and he also doesn't get much of the blame for everything that has gone wrong). The mother was written as pretty pathetic, and I found it difficult to have any sympathy for her. I wanted to feel sorry for her, but she was written so over the top that I really couldn't make myself care for her character. I do wish that there had been more of a resolution with her storyline since she never really had to answer to Lexi for being a terrible mother.

I never really felt much for the supporting characters, especially Lexi's 2 best friends. I found them to be pretty flat and not well developed. The author tried to give them little personality quirks to make them interesting, but it just didn't work for me. What did work was the closeness that Lexi and her friends shared. I enjoyed their honesty and loyalty.

I really wanted to like this book, but I thought this was just okay. It had too much 'beauty pageant' bad behavior for my taste. I was disappointed that after all of the build up, the boy of Lexi's dreams turned out to be not so great. But, by suddenly displaying behavior that he had never shown before, it felt like it was just an easy 'out' for Lexi to stop liking him and start liking someone else.

In the end, I did like that Lexi learned that you don't have to lose part of yourself to be well liked. She started to discover who she is and who she wants to be. But overall, this book fell short for me. I don't think it was everything that it could have been. It was a quick read and did have some moments of humor that lightened things up a bit.

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


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